Community Safety Expo

Partnership work leads to success in getting crime down. That was the key message from the PFCC Essex’s Community Safety Expo 24 held last week at Boreham House near Chelmsford.

The Expo was attended by more than 250 representatives of community safety partners, including Essex Police, Essex County Fire and Rescue Service, the Violence and Vulnerability Unit (VVU), charities, community groups and council partners.

The VVU had both a presence at the Expo and a speaking slot where we presented to delegates the work we have been doing to support communities and young people and the impact it has had on helping drive down crime in our county.

We presented our latest film Fearless Futures which tells how a life can turn around with the right support and interventions. We worked with spoken word artist Quentin Green on the film and using case studies from young people we support he bought to life the journey young people go on to make a positive “fearless” future.

In the Expo we had a graffiti wall in which delegates could write their thoughts about what prevents serious violence within our communities. There was the chance to learn more about our work, view our films and also speak with one of the projects we support – the Wilderness Foundation – on how they use education and nature based therapy to support children, young people and their families.

Roger Hirst, Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for Essex, told the Expo: “Partnership working is key to our approach – our approach has always been to achieve results with organisations and agencies working with each other.

“We are going to do more of what works. Our success shows we know the things that work and we are going to more of them.”

In his closing speech Mr Hirst underlined the successes achieved since 2016 by all the organisations present at the event – anti-social behaviour down by 71%, homicide down 55% and a 70% reduction in drug related knife homicide.

The very latest year-on-year figures to the end of January 2024 show all incidents of anti-social behaviour in Essex down 38.5% with all crime down by 5.9%.